[brudgers]

To a first approximation your experience is why micropayments have never taken hold…

They seem as much like a great idea here in 2023 as they did in 1994 when I first read about the idea. I had just started using the internet.

Micropayments are infeasible because financial infrastructure has non-trivial costs. The costs are non-trivial because there the highest incentives to steal money and thus systems need hardened surfaces.

At $0.30/transaction the cost of 10,000,000 automated attacks per hour/day/week becomes real money.

And at $0.30/transaction there seems to be enough money to provide enough resources to make the system robust enough.

Anyway, charging more is an easy way to make the business viable if it is going to be viable…and if you can’t provide $10 of value it probably isn’t.

Good luck.

[supertrope]

Indeed. Even stored value systems that cannot be directly cashed out suffer fraud. E.g. Toll-free phone numbers suffer traffic pumping fraud. Fraudsters robocall and try to keep each call going as long as possible as they get a cut of the per minute revenue. Bitcoin ushered in the direct monetization of stolen CPU time without having to first use it for spam, DDoS, etc.

[fnomnom]

whatever happened to flattr?